Web Forms: Grants Management

The Challenge

A large federal customer needed to support their innovation grants program. The program would evaluate potential grantee projects in order to support innovation within a large and complex geographically dispersed organization.

The team needed a solution that would not only enable the intake of these innovation grants but also a mechanism to assign the completed grant application and associated project files so that multiple reviewers could evaluate them prior to award.

The team expected more than a thousand complex applications and the review team was located in eight different states. In order to ensure a fair process, the team wanted to standardized their review process and assessment as a part of their grant evaluation. They also wanted the ability for reviewers to provide feedback and collaborate with prospective grantees to ensure the best possible grantee experience.

The Solution

Our team worked with the customer to establish a standard set of questions that prospective grantees would be assigned in order to develop a full understanding of the innovation projects they wanted to develop. This included the ability to pick from three separate grant funding levels with different data requirements.

It also included leveraging ExAM’s Lightning Forms portal to support complex web form interactions between end users and administrators in order to host these separate web forms and manage the end user interactions with those forms.

Our team worked with the Grants team to define notifications tied to the grants life cycle so that every time a grant was submitted the team would be notified and the grant would be assigned to a reviewer or reviewer team for review.

The Grants team used a standard evaluation assessment built in ExAM to review the grants. This series of questions leveraged ExAM’s native scoring capabilities in order to help rack and stack assessments for easier selection by the evaluation committee.

Comprehensive analytics were developed to support every stage of the effort from monitoring the flow of grants and data into the process, to helping support management of the review process to enabling insight into the topics and innovation areas being submitted by prospective grantees.

ExAM to Salesforce to Wave Analytics

Real Understanding in Real Time

Applications

Day Turnaround

Application Types

Amazing Result

Driving Executive Decision Making

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Light Grants Management

ExAM helps you assess and evaluate things (hence the A for Assessment in ExAM) and in this case, makes it easy to build an application form and another to review it as well as support the business logic to get it from the applicant to the reviewer. Salesforce and ExAM came together to build a light grants management solution in less than 100 days. Now in its third year and with a few more refinements ExAM continues to support this grants management business line.

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Easy to Use

ExAM lets you focus on the questions you want and makes it easy to create a user-friendly interface for collecting and processing data. The easiest way to make your grants process hard for your team it to make it hard for the applicant. ExAM makes it easy for applicants to focus on their application, not the technology.

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Supporting the Whole Business Process

The Salesforce platform has outstanding workflow and business process automation tools. ExAM takes advantage of all of this native capability and provides its own configuration capabilities to help you easily transform your forms management or grants management process. ExAM has its own Reviewer Assignment pages available and can help you support the entire grants management process.

Learn How We Did It

From the idea to the customer in six weeks. Our team and their team became one team fast. ExAM makes it so you don’t have to worry about the technology. We were able to focus on the answers we needed, the questions we needed to get those answers and the analytics we needed to make that information actionable.